CAN'T WASTE WARM NIGHT

Oh yeah man it's a hot(ish) summer night, my TV is turned up to
maximum volume with weird music videos on Rage, and I'm naked
because I like it and it saves money on air conditioning. But
most importantly it means I can boot up my old 33MHz 468 Toshiba
laptop, so I might as well write some rubbish for my phlog.

Hey look it's one of those 70s dye projector things in this one,
eh you're not following that are you? Well this machine might just
be my babbling terminal because I've come here with nothing to say
and I'm saying it. Who cares anyway?

Thanks to Dacav Doe at tilde.art.music I've finally fixed the links
to my Module Mania tracker module and SID music collection CDs, so
you can all finally stop waiting to get your hands on those. :)

Car servicing went with mixed success on Sunday. I...

Shit! I just stopped because I remembered that I meant to check the
old router that I set up to finally run the finished version of my
Firetext service that sends SMS messages to a relative who wants
them when there's a fire in his area. I stuffed it up the first
time because I used Busybox wget, which in --spider mode actually
still downloads the full file and just doesn't do anything with it,
unlike GNU Wget which just gets the headers with the file length
(I check whether that's changed and the idea is it only downloads
the full file if it has - no the server doesn't provide an Etag and
the update time is meaningless). So it chewed through the limited
mobile internet data in no time, and now I'm testing again. So
yesterday at this time at night I set it going and was now going to
check the total Tx/Rx data shown by ifconfig. BUT I go to plug in
the ethernet cable and in my usual clumbsy way I knock it over,
and the USB mobile broadband modem comes out, so the ifconfig
device gets removed and I loose my data stats. I can look it up
on the mobile account website, but that lags by 24-48hrs so if I need
to increase the interval between updates I still can't know in order
to begin testing that tonight. Damn I hate testing things.

Similar sort of thing with the Jag really. I finally got the wheel
hub together properly after pulling it all apart and tapping it
together about four times in total eliminating theories as to what
went wrong. In the end I don't know what I did wrong - it just
went together better. All that I can think is that I was holding it
upright from the bottom instead of the top. So I'm not even rewarded
with a lesson to learn from that one. Well I suppose I am because in
my excitement I then hurridly put on the brake disc, wheel, torqued
up all the various nuts, and drove half-way out of the shed before I
heard a clunk and slowly realised that I hadn't put the brake caliper
back on - it was still sitting loose amongst the suspension parts. Of
course "put the brake caliper on" isn't exactly a step I was unaware
of, but I'd put it on twice by that point before needing to take it
off, so my hopeless memory tends to get mixed up with which stage in
the disaster chain I'm at. So now it's closed up all the way, and it
looks like I'll have to open the bleed screw and let some fluid out
before it's possible to pry the brake pads apart. But I'll probably
manage to let air in or something doing that, so as the brake fluid
is due to be changed anyway now logic dicatates I should do that,
and so I've got another job to do before I can get it back on the
road.

I just get fed up with myself doing these things. I really don't
know how I'd do working for someone else - are these sort of
mistakes forgivable in industry? Because no degree of familiarity
with a task seems to avoid them in my case. Actually I do believe
that anyone is in theory capable of doing absolutely anything, and
thought is just an extremely complex sequence of random outcomes
biased in certain ways by instinct, learning, and emotion. That's
the theory I've come up with to explain myself anyway.

It's things like that that make me wonder why I do bother attempting
things though. I never really know the answer to that. Many things I
work on are for money, making it, or saving it in the case of
servicing the Jag. But it's not really the true motivation, and not
at all for things like Firetext. Somehow there's a natural drive,
clearly stronger in some than others, to take an idea and realise it.
Maybe it is something everyone has, but expressed in different ways.
Instead of creating, maybe for some people it's living a particular
social life, or marrying a particular person, or something like that.
But the drive itself, I think that's a bet, a gamble. You have an
idea in your head and to realise it is a rush of emotion, and you
chase that rush, that feeling of dream becoming reality. It's an
addiction. In fact it might be exactly what gambling plays to - it
provides an effortless way to realise the dream of a win, maybe.
Something/someone else randomises the outcome so that you don't have
to. So as opposed to a gambling addict (I don't gamble, by the way,
I'm too obsessed with rationality), I'm a creating addict.

It might not be a good thing either. You hear all about the pain of
gambling addiction. But what about someone like me who starts their
own business, how many of them must ruin themselves when it doesn't
work out? The outcomes might be much the same, but society relies on
the latter in order to function, so instead of looking down upon it
we embrace it, holding up the sucesses as heroes of business, while
the failures go unknown.

So then, I'm a creating addict. Making bugger-all money, driving
myself nuts trying to achieve things that don't really matter, and
not getting within a bull's wolf-whistle of a pretty woman. A bad
case indeed, but I manage somehow, and no-one's going to change me,
so that's just how it'll have to be. You never know, maybe I'll hit
it lucky some day...

 - The Free Thinker